In todays business environment creating, processing, moving and accessing stored information are tasks that consume substantial amounts of time. Consequently, it is important to know how effectively and quickly these tasks are performed by the hardware and software systems utilized to accomplish these tasks.
A terminal system typically consists of a keyboard and a display monitor communicating with a host processor directly or via a controller. Terminal system response time is defined as the time elapsed from the instant a terminal user's request is generated by depression of a key on the keyboard until a response is received from the host and displayed on the screen of the display monitor.
Some commercially available terminals have built in features which allow them to internally measure their own response time measurements (RTM). While some of the built in RTM features do measure the response time fairly accurately, because they are internal to a system they are limited to a specific system, depend upon the internal timer resolution, are protocol specific and therefore cannot be directly compared to response times determined by terminal systems manufactured by other vendors.